The Yoga of the Division of the Three Gunas

Chapter fourteen takes a concept the Gita has used since chapter two and finally sets it out properly. Everything born of nature is woven from three strands, and the word itself means a strand of a rope, which is the image to hold. They are clarity, energy and inertia, and the chapter's subject is that each of the three binds the imperishable self to the body, including the one that looks like a virtue.

Clarity is described as luminous and free of disease, and it binds by attachment to happiness and by attachment to knowledge. That is the chapter's sharpest point. Being calm, well and clear headed is a form of bondage, because the person becomes attached to being that way. Energy, characterised as craving and thirst, binds by attachment to action. Inertia, born of ignorance, deludes all embodied beings and binds by heedlessness, indolence and sleep.

The three are not fixed types. The chapter is explicit that each rises by suppressing the other two, so a person is under a different strand at different hours, and gives the marks by which the current one can be recognised: when the light of knowledge appears in all the gates of the body, clarity is uppermost; greed, restlessness and the undertaking of works indicate energy; darkness, inactivity, negligence and delusion indicate inertia.

The destinations follow the same three way division, with those established in clarity going upward, those of energy remaining in the middle, and those of inertia going down. It is a scheme of psychology and cosmology at once, and the following chapters apply it to faith, food, giving, work and understanding in turn.

Arjuna asks the practical question at the end of chapter fourteen. By what marks is the person who has gone beyond the three strands known, how do they behave, and how do they get past them?

The answer refuses to describe an achievement. Such a person does not hate illumination, activity or delusion when they are present, and does not long for them when they are absent. They sit like one indifferent, unshaken by the strands, aware that it is the strands that are turning and standing apart without wavering. They are the same in pleasure and pain, the same toward a clod of earth, a stone and gold, the same to the pleasant and the unpleasant, the same in praise and blame, in honour and dishonour, the same to friend and enemy, and they have given up every undertaking.

None of that is a power. There is nothing here that could be demonstrated or that would look impressive from outside, and the chapter deliberately closes off the reading in which transcending nature means gaining control over it. The strands continue to turn; what changes is that the person is no longer identified with the turning.

The chapter ends by naming the means, and it is the one the Gita always names: unswerving devotion. The one who serves God with an undeviating discipline of devotion, having gone beyond these strands, is fit to become the absolute. The final verse then says that Krishna is the foundation of the absolute, of the imperishable, of everlasting right order and of unfailing happiness, which quietly restates the relation the whole book has been building toward.